


Heterochromia

by lilacsigil



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Domestic Violence, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-28
Updated: 2011-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-20 19:43:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inheritance is complicated in the Stryker family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heterochromia

Marcia could identify the exact moment that she became Marcy, even though she didn't acquire that nickname until years afterwards. She had been at the pub with a group of her friends, all celebrating the end of their very last exams; in Marcia's case, she was also drowning her sorrows at being refused entry to the doctoral program. She'd hadn't been accepted anywhere, despite her all-but-certain First, though the five men in her class who'd applied had all been accepted immediately.

Two American men in rumpled suits were going from person to person, showing a photograph. When Marcia saw it, she threw back her shandy and laughed. "I know him. He's that little weasel with the American sister. Charles Xavier. What did he do, chat up your wife?"

"No, ma'am," said one of the Americans. "We're here following up on some very serious allegations."

Marcia laughed again, glad to be distracted from her maudlin evening. "Well, I don't think he cheated on his thesis, if that's what you're worried about. He tried to get me to read it, and I asked him if it belonged in the science fiction section. I really don't know what's going on over in genetics for that to be awarded a PhD, but it can't be good."

"We're more interested in his current location, ma'am."

"Oh." Marcia was suddenly bored again. "I'm sorry, I haven't seen him in months. I can give you his telephone number in Oxford if you like, but I don't think he's here."

"No thank you, ma'am, we have that detail already."

The Americans left, but within half an hour another American had shown up, and taken the seat beside her. He was an older man, and his suit, while not expensive, was at least neat.

"I hear you're the girl who understood Xavier's thesis," he said, and bought her another drink.

"Is that a crime now?" If she hadn't been drunk, she might have just walked away.

"Not at all, ma'am. But I'm not a scientist, and I'm having difficulty with it."

Oh, she thought. Charles has done something really stupid, probably involving drugs.

"It's not science – well, there's perfectly good science in there, but his conclusions are unsupportable. We might all be able to read each other's thoughts in 100,000 years, or we might all be blown up next week and the cockroaches take over. Evolution isn't precise, or linear, or even progressive. A jellyfish is perfectly adapted to its own environment, but here we are, rulers of the Earth, with upside-down sinuses and haemorrhoids."

"You don't think it's possible, all the things he discusses?"

"I think it's absolutely possible – just unpredictable. For example, how many changes would you have to make before a human brain can read thoughts? How many of those changes would be beneficial in themselves? We wouldn't suddenly jump from "no telepathy" to "telepathy" like Xavier proposes. There would be in-between stages."

"You're quite passionate about it."

"Only because they'll give him a PhD and throw me out to go have babies. My brother had spina bifida, you know. I wanted to do something to help children like him." And me, she secretly adds, as she always does. She has it too, though not as badly. It manifests as a tired back and mild scoliosis; in her brother it manifested as hydrocephaly.

"Well, then." Agent Stryker – as she later came to know him – smiled. "Would you like a job?"

\---

She did want a job, and it turned out that Xavier was not just a weaselly little flirt but a liar and a manipulator. "Mutants", as everyone called them, were perfectly real. Marcia now had the chance to investigate the nature of their powers. She was the biochemist in a multi-disciplinary team, and her work was far more absorbing than a PhD would have been. Stryker had given her access to all kinds of mutants, in particular a pair of Canadian half-brothers with vastly accelerated healing abilities. They were sleazy thugs, the pair of them, but that's about all she expected from men working for the US military. What she didn't expect was Stryker's son, Bill. He was military, too, but polite, handsome, smart enough to keep up with what she was doing, and confident enough not to be afraid that she was doing it. He was the one that started calling her Marcy, in a letter from Asia, on the card attached to a bouquet of flowers on her birthday, in bed in a hotel in Los Angeles when he briefly returned from his latest deployment.

They married in his childhood church in June 1967, and he went back to Vietnam just two days later. He hadn't yet returned when Jason was born, but Marcy – everyone called her Marcy now – had everything planned out. She would do her PhD while Jason was young and needed her at home; she'd be accepted anywhere with the work she'd done, and Bill's sister had offered help take care of Jason when he was a little older. Women had families and careers now, and if anyone could balance the two it was her.

Jason was born with spina bifida and a cleft palate, just like Marcy, just like her brother, and all her plans stopped. By the time Bill got back, she had thrown herself full-time into the role of Jason's Mom, his protector, white knight and full-time carer. She didn't even care that Bill was disappointed in Jason, in his damaged body and over-sized head. Jason was her son, and she was going to fix him. When Jason's eye colour settled into blue/green heterochromia just like her own, she wasn't surprised at all: he was her son, absolutely, and she was his world.

The first time Bill hit her day was she worked out that she, Jason and her brother didn't have spina bifida at all, but the hereditary Waardenburg syndrome.

"So if we have another child, he'll have this too," he shouted.

"Not necessarily," she explained, proud that she had discovered their true diagnosis. It was too late for her brother, but not for her son. "It's a dominant gene, so I most likely only have one copy. But I don't want another child, not until I fix Jason."

"Fix him? You made him like this!" Bill knocked her to the ground and kicked her while she lay there, and all she thought about was how she was going to get Jason to eat his breakfast tomorrow, and whether his reluctance to eat was related to his condition.

That wasn't the only gene that changed Jason's relationship with his father. One day, when Marcy was getting Jason's strained vegetables ready, she accidentally got ice cream. She fed Jason half the tub before she noticed. Jason laughed when he realised she'd noticed.

"Tricked you!" he shouted in her mind, much more clearly than he ever actually spoke. Marcy's stomach dropped. Jason was a mutant, in Xavier's sense.

Bill got angrier, and while Marcy wasn't scared of him – he wasn't important– Jason was. Once, Bill fell down the stairs thinking he was being chased by snakes, then beat Marcy's head against the fridge until she called for Jason to stop.

"Fix him, or I'm going to kill him," he told Marcy the next day. "He has no right to do that to me."

"I won't let you," she snapped.

"You can't stop me, and you know it."

Bill was right, of course. With his connections, no-one would ever find out. So Marcy dialled a number in New York State, and spoke to a man she hadn't even thought of in a very long time. She planned to get back to that PhD with Jason gone, but somehow – she missed him so much – it never happened. She visited Jason every weekend, and he seemed happier there. It was worth a long and exhausting drive that ate up her Mondays and Fridays as well. Bill never quite got it together to put a word in for her at the lab, she never quite decided where she should apply for other work. Xavier offered her a teaching position, but she couldn't think of anything worse than trying to pound the principles of chemistry into the heads of teenagers with that sanctimonious man hovering over her.

\---

Despite what Bill assumed would happen, Xavier didn't fix Jason. When Jason turned fourteen, though, a shunt was inserted to help drain his excess cerebrospinal fluid – something Marcy's brother had had done around the same age – and something happened to his powers. He couldn't affect everyone, anymore. He could affect Marcy, but not Bill, and Marcy didn't know why. Bill was delighted, and asked Xavier to turn Jason's powers all the way down. Xavier not only refused but offered to investigate how to get them working again. Marcy didn't care either way, as long as Jason was happy, but it was Bill whose word was law.

Bill brought him home, of course, and while Marcy was thrilled to have him back, he wasn't the same boy she'd sent to school in Westchester County. The shunt had helped him to have more time out of his wheelchair, but all the speech he had gained while away at school vanished within weeks. He constantly stared at his father, ignoring his mother, and wouldn't co-operate with anyone. He still liked pool therapy, but that and Star Trek reruns were the only things that broke through his shell. Marcy fed him, washed him, gave him his medications and tried to educate him, but he was bigger than her now, and no longer smelled or felt like her little boy. He would briefly hug her, once every few days, but otherwise she may as well have been anybody, not his mother.

Marcy heard Bill shouting at him, telling him to do what he was told late at night, but he'd never hit Jason so she didn't intervene.

"You'll control who I tell you to control!" he bellowed, or "I don't care if you don't like it, I'm taking a sample anyway!"

She put the pillow over her head and tried to sleep.

One morning, she found herself sitting at the kitchen table with Bill's power drill in her hand. Jason sat across from her, staring, and he looked so very different to her son that for a moment she didn't recognise him.

"Make Dad go away," he said in her mind. "Make him go away or you'll be sorry."  
Marcy said nothing, just stared at his face until she understood.

"I'm already sorry," she replied, "But I can't make him go away."

She lifted the power drill to her head, because it was harmless, because it would fix everything, because she knew it would stop Jason.

"I can't do it – make him go away!"

She both knew and didn't know what would happen when she pressed the switch, as Jason tore at her perceptions, trying to find something that would make her drive Bill away.

Jason's face twisted in anger and terror, and Marcy knew why she didn't recognise him: despite the different coloured eyes, that was not her face on her child. It was Bill's face.

She pressed the switch and Marcy went away.

**Author's Note:**

> In my head canon, Jason had some kind of medical issue that led his father to access to his spinal fluid and Stryker's exploitation of his son continued from that point. When we saw Charles flirt with a woman with heterochromia – just like Jason – in First Class, I thought that she could well be related to Jason, especially as William Stryker Senior is also in the movie.
> 
> I looked up spina bifida to see how strongly it was inherited, and it turns out that there is a condition called Waardenburg syndrome that, in some manifestations, causes neural tube defects and heterochromia with one bright blue eye. Then I had to write this story. The woman with heterochromia and Stryker's wife go unnamed in the movies, but her comics canon name is Marcy.


End file.
